Fiction Quotes - Page 23

• The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.

  Tom Rachman

  Training, Hours, Journalist

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• I just love historical fiction.

  Jennifer Donnelly

  Historical, Historical Fiction

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• Rick Bass is one of a dwindling handful of American fiction writers still celebrating the importance of place, the natural world, and the struggle of a few brave souls to live and work respectfully in what's left of our western wilderness...The Lives of Rocks is his most lyrical and powerful book to date...a masterwork.

  Howard Frank Mosher

  Powerful, Struggle, Book

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• Fiction has subversive potential. People let it into their minds, like the Trojan Horse. They don't know what's inside. You hook them with the story, and God can work below the level of their consciousness. Fiction can be propaganda for evil or convey a theme that impacts people for good.

  Randy Alcorn

  Horse, Impact, Evil

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• Ven you read the speeches in the papers, and see as vun gen'lman says of another, 'the Honourable member, if he vill allow me to call him so' you vill understand, sir, that that means, 'if he vill allow me to keep up that 'ere pleasant and uniwersal fiction.'

  Charles Dickens

  Funny, Humorous, Mean

  Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Edwin Drood and Miscellaneous”, Cosimo, Inc.

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• Increasingly, those who used to teach and write critical or theoretical texts are writing fiction, poetry and so on; and kinds of texts are being produced that call for budding readers rather different from those who studied literature in the past.

  Nicholas Royle

  Writing, Past, Poetry

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• They recite their sacred books, although the fact informs me that these are a fiction from first to last. O Reason, thou (alone) speakest the truth. Then perish the fools who forged the (religious) traditions or interpreted them!

  Al-Maʿarri

  Religious, Book, Sacred

  "Studies in Islamic Poetry (The Meditations of Al-Ma'arri)". Book by Reynold Alleyne Nicholson, 1921.

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• In language at once stark and delicate, Suki Kim shatters the polemic of North and South Korea. She couples an investigative reporter's fierce desire to strip away the fiction of the Hermit Kingdom with an immigrant's insatiable hunger for an emotional home, no matter how troubled and no matter how impossible.

  Monique Truong

  Couple, Home, Emotional

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• My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives.

  George Steiner

  Teacher, Writing, Hands

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• I know that for every reader who has lost the habit or can't find the time, there are people who've never enjoyed reading and question the value of literature, either as entertainment or education, or believe that a love of books, and of fiction in particular, is sentimental or frivolous.

  David Nicholls

  Believe, Book, Reading

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• For the best part of my childhood I visited the local library three or four times a week, hunching in the stacks on a foam rubber stool and devouring children's fiction, classics, salacious thrillers, horror and sci-fi, books about cinema and origami and natural history, to the point where my parents encouraged me to read a little less.

  David Nicholls

  Children, Book, Parent

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• This is a collection of dexterous, loving, beautifully optimistic work that left me breathless and delighted.... Hannu Rajaniemi's magnificent science fiction - as is paradoxically appropriate - is pure magic.

  Amal El-Mohtar

  Optimistic, Magic, Breathless

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• In science-fiction films the monster should always be bigger than the leading lady.

  Roger Corman

  Monsters, Film, Leading Ladies

  Ed Naha, Roger Corman (1982). “The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget”

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• And if I'm guilty of having gratuitous sex, then I'm also guilty of having gratuitous violence, and gratuitous feasting, and gratuitous description of clothes, and gratuitous heraldry, because very little of this is necessary to advance the plot. But my philosophy is that plot advancement is not what the experience of reading fiction is about. If all we care about is advancing the plot, why read novels? We can just read Cliffs Notes.

  George R. R. Martin

  Sex, Philosophy, Reading

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• I was trained mainly as a short story writer and that's how I started writing, but I've also become very interested in non-fiction, just because I got a couple of magazine jobs when I was really poor and needed the money and it turned out that non-fiction was much more interesting than I thought it was.

  David Foster Wallace

  Jobs, Couple, Writing

  Source: www.nybooks.com

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• I never have an alter ego in the movies. That's a fiction that the press has made up over the years, and it's fun to write that. It gives them something to write.

  Woody Allen

  Fun, Writing, Years

  "Woody Allen Discusses "Match Point"". Interview with Cole Smithey, www.colesmithey.com. December 20, 2005.

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• Everything of this life as a mortal is fiction. It seems real, but...

  Richard Bach

  Real, This Life, Seems

  "The Adventures of a Reluctant Student". Interview with Lee Stephen Gawtry, www.watkinsmagazine.com. May 16, 2014.

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• There is no such thing as too ordinary to write about, whether that's life or a scene in a novel. What's interesting to people, whether it's memoir or fiction, is the truth.

  Augusten Burroughs

  Writing, People, Interesting

  Interview with Austin Allen, bigthink.com. November 3, 2009.

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• I think action movies on the whole have moved more and more into large spectacle, even leaving out super hero movies that seem to me to be more a fantastic science fiction than they are action movies.

  Walter Hill

  Hero, Thinking, Leaving

  Source: collider.com

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• Horror is one of the few genres - romance and comedy are the other two that come to mind - that's all emotion-driven. It's not a rational genre, like science fiction is. It's irrational by nature. And it is capable of exploring all aspects of human experience.

  Stephen R. Bissette

  Two, Romance, Mind

  Interview with Chris Dahlen, www.avclub.com. July 23, 2009.

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• I don't think people are averse to thinking about things in a deep way, but we have limited time and opportunity to think about things in a deep way. I think that's why there is an appetite for non-fiction - it gives people the opportunity to reexamine ordinary experience and be smarter about it.

  Malcolm Gladwell

  Opportunity, Thinking, People

  Interview with Donna Bowman, www.avclub.com. November 17, 2008.

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• Civilization means food and literature all round. Beefsteaks and fiction magazines for all. First-class proteins for the body, fourth-class love-stories for the spirit.

  Aldous Huxley

  Mean, Civilization, Class

  Aldous Huxley (1955). “The Collected Works of Aldous Huxley”

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• If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Wall, War, Taken

  Henry David Thoreau (2016). “A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers”, p.178, Xist Publishing

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• We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.

  J. G. Ballard

  Technology, World, Branches

  "Crash". Book by J. G. Ballard, 1973.

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• The unity of effect or impression is a point of the greatest importance. It is clear, moreover, that this unity cannot be thoroughly preserved in productions whose perusal cannot be completed at one sitting.

  Edgar Allan Poe

  Unity, Sitting, Literature

  Edgar Allan Poe (2009). “Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe”, p.521, Springer Science & Business Media

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